Apple Offered Jobs to the People From Shut-Down Huxe and Licensed Its Technology: We Learn About the Deal From Brussels, Not Cupertino

Apple didn't buy Huxe. At least not on paper. In a filing with the European Commission, the company disclosed that it had agreed to offer jobs to "certain employees of Huxe AI" and to obtain a non-exclusive license to the startup's intellectual property. The firm does not become part of Apple. What goes to Cupertino are the people and the right to use what they invented.

The industry calls deals like this a "reverse acqui-hire" - buying the team without buying the company. In recent years they have become a favorite tool of big tech companies: you hire the founders, license the technology and get AI talent, while dodging part of the antitrust scrutiny a classic acquisition brings. What's left of the startup? In Huxe's case - almost nothing.

Huxe was founded by developers who had previously worked on the AI-generated podcasts in Google's NotebookLM, the tool since renamed Gemini Notebook. On May 21 the startup announced it was shutting down: the app was being pulled from Apple's and Google's stores, the service was ending and user data was being deleted. "The team is moving on to new things and we won't be developing the product further," they wrote. On June 9, less than three weeks later, Apple was already filing the deal with the European regulator.

The filing doesn't say who got an offer, whether anyone accepted, or what Apple plans to do with the technology. The timing says more: Huxe announced its shutdown just a day after Spotify unveiled its own AI-generated podcast features, so Apple may want something similar for its Podcasts app. Tech bosses clearly believe personalized audio read to you by a machine can replace real podcasts. How many ordinary listeners want that - nobody knows yet. And we learn about the whole deal from Brussels, not Cupertino.